Credit to @ryanc@infosec.exchange
I just did the graphic
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- 11 days
Building a PC in 2026 be like “I cant afford RAM, but I can use a whole TB hard disk I shucked from an old WD external as swap and maybe my PC will feel modern”
- 11 days
Real Linux users do not use MacOS window decorations in their graphics.
;)
- 11 days
I used to be this guy. We have huge amount of memory in our storage server. Why would we need swap? Well, once the system started killing programs I read up on swap and how the system handles its caches, especially ZFS ARC.
Short version is that while the system can evict its caches syncronously, it can only async notify ZFS that it should also shrink its caches, but the out-of-memory killer will start killing before ZFS and its kernel counterpart can start to free up memory.
A tiny bit of swap completely solved this, since swapping is sync for the kernel and the OOM killer will wait for it.
- 10 days
Swap is there an emergency relief for when a runaway process starts to eat all the resources. The system gets slow the user says hey what’s that? They look and see oh wow this one process is really eating a lot of resources that’s bad, can I kill it or do I need to gracefully try to shut it down. Swap buys you time when it could matter. When you don’t have swap OOM killer takes out whatever it wants and for a desktop user that may not be that big of a deal but for a server the database is likely the first target that is taken out.
- 10 days
you misunderstand the meme (of course it doesn’t help either); because the alternative isn’t “no swap”, but rather “use a swap file instead of swap partition”
- 5 days
Hrmm. How does that change the SSD problem if you are using a file on the SSD? I reread the meme. Maybe I’m too blurry eyed still but I don’t see that coming through.
